Do you have a connection with a drink, an item or ritual that brings you calm and connects you to your roots and others?
Mate is an infusion that has the power to bring people together to create shared memories, it teaches you patience and for those living outside our home country, it connects us back to our origins and reminds us of our loved ones.
It is a custom very close to my heart, with a rich history and a ritual full of positive feelings and intentions. All this pushed me to find a way to join the community of people who want to introduce this tradition with new people.
Mate is an infusion that it's mostly drank in a social setting, where everyone drinks from the same gourd. This custom brings people together and allows for the creation of shared memories. It also teaches you patience, as you wait for your turn, and for those living outside our home country, it connects us back to our origins and reminds us of our loved ones.
It is a custom very close to my heart, with a rich history and a ritual full of positive feelings and intentions. All this pushed me to find a way to join the community of people who want to introduce this tradition to others.
Create an introductory experience to drinking yerba mate that conveys well its history and the cultural and emotional meaning.
Start - September
Release - December
Maximum £500
I wore my many hats during the different stages of the projects from the initial concept, through research, design, and build, all the way up to conversations with shop owners. But no projects is fully developed individually. Throughout the process I was able to reach out to other professionals and as well as existing and possible consumers to consult, get feedback and carry out user testing.
While the UK has a big market for tea, yerba mate is still very unknown. This has been confirmed through mine and other South American’s experiences when we try to get our yerba refill. Yerba mate can be purchased from very few online sellers and ever fewer South American shops at a fairly high cost.
Another proof appear when I take my mate in a public environment (office, park...) and every time there was at least one person that gathered their courage and asked me what was this dodgy drink all about. And this is a common anecdote within the South American mate drinkers diaspora.
So yerba mate is not even close to becoming an ubiquitous object in the UK. Germany, Spain, France and Netherlands are leading the charts on yerba mate imports. Interestingly, it seems that this could be a purposeful situation as importers have expressed to me their struggles when trying to acquire fair trade and organic certifications linking its failure with the fact that the UK doesn't want to add another competitor to tea.
Online, the mate products are presented in a way that speaks mostly to existing drinkers. Some specialty tea shops do sell yerba mate, but to drink it like a normal tea instead of the traditional way in a gourd with a straw.
Lower the barrier to acquire a yerba mate set
Create a beautiful set that includes all the items needed including a the how-to prepare the drink and social rules
Honour the tradition by including the historical and cultural context as part of the set
The origins of mate aren’t disputed, everyone knows that it comes from the Guaraní people but the form in which the drink is consumed today and other details of the tradition can be found to be credited to different individuals or groups of poeple depending which blog or site you are reading.
In summary, the process of harvesting, drying and preparing yerba mate to drink it socially in a gourd with a filter-straw was already being done by the Guaraní people before they were "discovered".
Historical accuracy is very important for me, so I relied on the work of researchers that highlighted their sources and processes in order to gather the material I wanted to include in the companion leaflet.
Throughout this research I was also able to learn about the evolution of the design and materials used to make the different items to drink mate. You can imagine that me being a designer I was very excited to read about.
Let me delight you with one fun fact. Filtered straws were originally made from cane, they were completely straight and had an even diameter through its length. The natural properties of the material helped regulate the temperature of the hot water reaching the drinkers mouth without burning their tongue or their lips.
When metal was introduced as a material, that heat regulation went out of the window as metal is a great heat conductor. For this reason, the tip of the straw was flatten, greatly reducing the stream of water coming out of it and therefore reducing the chance of burns. Lovely little piece of information of why things are the way they are today.
The origins of mate aren’t disputed, everyone knows that it comes from the Guaraní people but the form in which the drink is consumed today and other details of the tradition can be found to be credited to different individuals or groups of poeple depending which blog or site you are reading.
In summary, the process of harvesting, drying and preparing yerba mate to drink it socially in a gourd with a filter-straw was already being done by the Guaraní people before they were "discovered".
Historical accuracy is very important for me, so I relied on the work of researchers that highlighted their sources and processes in order to gather the material I wanted to include in the companion leaflet.
Throughout this research I was also able to learn about the evolution of the design and materials used to make the different items to drink mate. You can imagine that me being a designer I was very excited to read about.
After selecting the information I wanted to include in the leaflet, I moved on to exploring the format in which to print it.
Considering the low budget and timeframe, I was after something easy to print, that didn’t require fixing different pieces together, but that had an interesting design. After trying and discarding the more common leaflet formats I’ve settled into a square twisting design.
I was specially drawn by how the creases divided the space on the page and how this could dictate the distribution of content, the flow and the interaction with the person.
The main challenge was the limit of space, however it was a positive thing as this forced me to be more succinct with the existing content, reducing it to the right length for someone who is just getting to know this tradition.
Throughout the design process, testing was a constant. From early lo-fi paper prototypes until the final design before production, I tested the leaflet with with people who both heard of mate before and those who didn’t know anything about it.
Over all, testing results came back more or less as expected, except for one one hypothesis: reading order.
Even though the content I selected wasn’t written with a ‘single reading order’ pattern I had a preferred direction, so after observing the results, I decided to re-arrange some of the content.
People will start reading from the top centre, and then continue clock wise moving through the different sections
The majority of people start reading in the assumed position, but then move through the sections from left to right until reaching the bottom.
After presenting these mate sets to the public, yerba mate is still not an ubiquitous item (surprise surprise). Throughout this project I was able to learn about import requirements, the local market, and confirm first hand how tough the online and retail market is. I take my hat off to shop owners and entrepreneurs out there.
Reaching out to customers brought me great joy and the feedback I received was very positive. My favourite being how they enjoy understanding the origins of the drink they were consuming and how now themselves have created an emotional connection with it.
So 2 out of 3 of my objectives were achieved and I look forward to keep exploring how I can achieve objective 1 and make more people aware of yerba mate.
Mate has replaced my second cup of coffee. I also like how this is a thing that I share with a very close friend of mine. When I drink it, it reminds me of those moments together.
